Multiple Printers and Print Jobs

[kbtarl]

I have been building computers for my brother in law whose business is shooting green screen photos at fairs and events. I have been using i5 processors with 32 gig of memory. He will sometimes have three canon 100-pro printers running at the same time and trying to use his green screen software but the system bogs so badly it sometimes just locks up.

My question is what can i do to alleviate this bottle neck and allow him to process faster? I have wondered if I should go to more cores like AMD Ryzen 1700 with 8 cores to help lighten the load on the processor. Is my reasoning on this correct? I have also thought about setting up another computer to be nothing but a print server. I have also told him to start putting money back for a beast of a machine as memory and video cards are out the roof now.

Please share any insights you may have on this problem.

Bruce (Kbtarl)

[DaveLembke]

I'd look at resources when doing this in task manager and see where your bottleneck or system freeze up is happening, is it really the CPU, or RAM, or is the software your using having some sort of issue that it doesnt matter how much processing power you have backing it it could be a problematic program etc. From your description it seems like a shotgun approach to just replace the system, but i have done shotgun moves before and found out later that it could have been corrected differently.

If your CPU pegs to 90+% then I'd say you need a better CPU. If the RAM is all used up, which I find using up 32GB of RAM kind of hard to do, then you will know you need more RAM, if the CPU acts like its sitting idle and not an excessive amount of RAM in use when the system acts up then its likely a system corruption or software issue. Reinstalling the OS and software fresh might correct for this or the software itself has issues which the software manufacturer may be able to assist with correcting. Other cause other than software corruption or bugged software would be possibly a hard drive that isnt quite healthy as for a hard drive or SSD is critical to system health due to how the system uses virtual memory. A system that is moved around setup here and everywhere else might get bumped around when transported and hard drives dont hold up well to this.

[BC_Programmer]

Computers in the 90's had fewer capabilities yet had zero issues printing to multiple network printers. This doesn't seem like a "Throw hardware at the problem" type of issue to me.

If the green screen software is being used through the network in some way and the three printers are all networked, particularly wirelessly, that could partly explain the problem as it would be network congestion. Particularly if there are multiple systems on said network trying to use the same files.

Depending on the software it may be a case of poor maintenance. Programs like Lightroom run incredibly slowly if their catalog is not optimized, for example.